Comparison of Logistic Regression, Information Value, and Comprehensive Evaluating Model for Landslide Susceptibility Mapping

This study validated the robust performances of the recently proposed comprehensive landslide susceptibility index model (CLSI) for landslide susceptibility mapping (LSM) by comparing it to the logistic regression (LR) and the analytical hierarchy process information value (AHPIV) model. Zhushan County in China, with 373 landslides identified, was used as the study area. Eight conditioning factors (lithology, slope structure, slope angle, altitude, distance to river, stream power index, slope length, distance to road) were acquired from digital elevation models (DEMs), field survey, remote sensing imagery, and government documentary data. Results indicate that the CLSI model has the highest accuracy and the best classification ability, although all three models can produce reasonable landslide susceptibility (LS) maps. The robust performance of the CLSI model is due to its weight determination by a back-propagation neural network (BPNN), which successfully captures the nonlinear relationship between landslide occurrence and the conditioning factors.